SUCCESS STORY
Argosy Hits the Jackpot
with OpenText and Teradata
®
Combining the capabilities of OpenText InfoFusion™ Integration
Center and Teradata, Argosy Gaming Company develops
improved information access
B
ehind the excitement, today’s best properties rely
on innovative technologies to help them add value
to every patron’s visit—every time.
Argosy Gaming Company, a leading owner
and operator of six riverboat casinos and
related entertainment and hotel facilities in
the midwestern and southern United States,
is a perfect case in point. With its broad range
of services, the organization constantly looks
for ways to improve patrons’ experiences
by customizing entertainment packages.
Argosy management can pack more value
into every patron’s visit by gathering information about their gaming preferences, preferred
activities, and favorite services. In fact, the
information Argosy gathers is critical for
developing new offerings.
Building a system to share
business information
way to get quick answers when we needed
them,” declares Jason Fortenberry, Argosy’s
Data Warehousing Analyst. “It was difficult
to consolidate and share information.”
Argosy decided to improve information access
by building a centralized enterprise data
warehouse to collect and store the data
running through the operational systems
at each property. “We didn’t want to spend
time managing data marts at each site, so
building a data warehouse was a logical
decision for us,” says Fortenberry.
OpenText leverages the
power of Teradata
In building the enterprise data warehouse,
Argosy management wanted the capability
to make quicker, targeted decisions based
on patrons’ behaviors, purchases, and preferences. They expected to improve this decisionmaking capability by enabling the corporate
office to access and analyze data from all
of the properties in aggregate.
Early in 2002, Argosy management began
to realize that delays in getting information to
the corporate headquarters in Alton, Illinois
were affecting the organization’s collective
ability to make targeted decisions quickly.
All business data at Argosy is captured by six
disparate operational database systems— To minimize the impact of queries on its operone running at each Argosy property. ational systems, Argosy chose Teradata ®
Requests for information had to be made as its enterprise data warehouse. Teradata
to each property individually. The only way enables Argosy to manage huge volumes
to share information between properties of data and run complex queries without
was by telephone and email. “We had no sacrificing performance.
EN T ER PR ISE I N FO R M AT I O N M A N AG E M EN T
Industry
Gaming
Customer
Argosy Gaming Company
Challenges
n
n
n
Six geographically separated
operational databases slowed centralized
decision-making
No system for sharing information
collected at individual properties
Too much time spent sourcing data to run
queries against operational databases
Solution
n
OpenText InfoFusion™ Integration Center
Benefits
n
n
n
Maximized performance by executing data
transformations on the Teradata database
Accelerated decision-making with more
timely and complete information—
reduced time to process requests from
days to minutes
Reduced ongoing maintenance costs by
at least 50 percent
SUCCESS STORY
“The ability of InfoFusion Integration Center to perform
data transformations on the Teradata database engine
is key to us meeting our performance requirements, and
it enabled us to cut our ongoing maintenance time to
less than half of what we expected.”
Jason Fortenberry, Data Warehousing Analyst, Argosy Gaming Company
As a strategic partner, OpenText works closely with Teradata, a division of NCR, to help
businesses integrate disparate data sources
into the Teradata database. Fortenberry
chose OpenText InfoFusion™ Integration
Center to extend Teradata’s capabilities by
automating many of the Extract, Transform,
Load (ETL) tasks that normally require timeconsuming programming. He is now introducing the enterprise data warehouse to connect
all six of Argosy’s operational systems.
One of the underlying objectives in building
the enterprise data warehouse was to standardize reports to make it easier to distribute
information throughout the organization.
Impact analysis and
usability impress
In addition to the InfoFusion Integration
Center advantages specific to Teradata,
Fortenberry was impressed by its impact
analysis capabilities. “Conceptually, ETL is a
very simple process of transferring source
data into a target database.
customizing offers for specific player segments, and adapting programs unique to
individual casinos.
Argosy management is currently assessing
the ROI of the entire data warehouse/ETL
project. When the final numbers are available, Fortenberry is confident that they will
highlight—and quantify—the organization’s
improved responsiveness. Before Argosy
implemented its enterprise data warehouse,
it took anywhere from a day to a week to get
information from each property’s operational
system. Now, a click of a button on a report
is all it takes to execute a query against the
enterprise data warehouse—information
requests are processed within minutes.
In selecting an ETL tool for Argosy’s enterprise
data warehouse, Fortenberry ruled out a
hand-coded solution early in the evaluation
process; “I’ve done a lot of ETL work by But the process of defining the source and
hand-coding before, which can be very time- the target can be very difficult,” he explains.
consuming and expensive to maintain. We “InfoFusion Integration Center makes things
wanted to minimize our reliance on program- much easier. It can connect to the source
mers and on maintaining program code.”
system and import the data models auto- The almost instantaneous response time for
Fortenberry wanted to maximize Argosy’s matically. It can perform comparisons queries coming out of Argosy’s corporate
investment in the Teradata platform, which between data models; if there is any headquarters has accelerated management’s
is partly why he chose InfoFusion Integration change in the source or target database, ability to make better-informed business
Center—it leverages Teradata’s processing for example, a click of a button in InfoFusion decisions. “Now we’re using the information
architecture by executing transformations Integration Center compares everything, indi- in the data warehouse to get a better idea
inside the Teradata database without cates what changes have to be made, and of who our top patrons are, what they like,
having to run the data through an external outlines how these changes will affect the ETL and what they don’t like,” notes Fortenberry.
ETL engine first. It also has native support
process. This capability alone is priceless.” “We can identify trends in their play and
for Teradata utilities and includes extensions
create offers and programs that are more
to run non-native programs if necessary.
Adding value to the
attractive to them.” By combining the capaFortenberry’s challenge at the beginning of gaming experience
bilities of InfoFusion Integration Center and
the project was to better understand the diffTeradata, Argosy Gaming Company can
Argosy’s
enterprise
data
warehouse
now
erences between each operational system.
“These vendor products have their own data enables marketing analysts, who were once innovate further to develop exciting enterstructures; we had to learn and understand spending an inordinate amount of time tainment combinations that attract new
them in order to find and extract the infor- sourcing data to fulfill requests, to spend patrons and keep thousands of regulars
mation we needed for the data warehouse,” the majority of their time refining marketing coming back for more. It looks like the best
activities—develoing direct mail campaigns, game in town just got better. n
he explains.
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